Can you guess what it is yet? Intel had been strangely circumspect
about today's big announcement: the business platform to match Centrino
in portables and Viiv in home systems. That's understandable; anyone
who's been paying attention for the past year could probably give the
PowerPoint presentation with their eyes shut. We didn't know the name —
although the good old Inquirer managed to do a weekend ferret and found
a site called www.vPro.com that linked to Intel's front page. So vPro
it is.

That's a mildly odd name. As connoisseurs of wild media will know,
vPro is the name of a Dutch public service broadcaster, Vrijzinnig
Protestantse Radio Omroep or the Liberal Protestant Radio Broadcasting
Company. It's a lot more liberal than Protestant these days, and
specialises in top weirdness; it's a bit like Intel calling their new
business platform Radio Odd Stuff.

We'll assume that this is pure coincidence.

But the strangest part of vPro is the specification. We don't know
what it is. We know most of it — the VT virtualisation is thoroughly
documented, the dual-coredness is as public as you like and the
graphics, memory and other aspects are pretty much sorted. That's what
you'd expect for a platform that's built on technologies that are all
announced and out there already.

But the management aspects are less well understood. We've asked,
but so far — nothing beyond marketing speil. That's a shame: unlike,
say, Vista, vPro has a solid reason to exist and many of the claims
Intel makes for it are liable to be both true and useful. You don't
need to be told how unusual and important that is in this business.

With Intel preparing for another big internal shake-up, the worry is
that it's about to change its ways about information and move to a
"licence or stay ignorant" model in an attempt to keep their rivals in
the dark.

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